I am currently in the process of getting my Microsoft Certification mainly because I was told I should.  I have started the process 3 times previously in my career but quickly “fell of the wagon” due to priorities I deemed more important such as bringing you this awesome blog content .  I guess I have never really placed a lot of importance in certifications and figured that my past work/reputation are enough.  Anyone can pass a test with enough memorization of content, but not everyone can deliver quality software applications.

My thoughts on certification

• I have never lost an opportunity as a consultant because I was not certified.
• Certification is beneficial to new grads/ new entries in the software development work force.
• Experience and proven track record should far out way a certification.
• The content, at least in Microsoft exams, does not reflect the world.
• You should be reimbursed for your time and fees should be covered by your employer and /or a comparable bonus should be awarded.

So, the point of this post, other than to get something out quick so I can get back to studying for said certification exam 1, is to ask a few questions to you my loyal audience.

1. Are you certified in any technology/methodology/software practice?
   
2. If you are certified:
1. What are you certified in?
2. Why did you get certified? 
3. Did the content you study reflect the real world?
4. Did you ever lose an opportunity prior to certification because you where not certified?
5. Since becoming certified have you gotten an opportunity because you are certified?
6. Did your employer provide compensation/bonus for becoming certified?
7. What have you gained by becoming certified?
8. Was it worth it?
   
3. If you are not certified:
   1. Why aren’t you?

I would love to hear what everyone has to say on this.  Thanks for your time.

I have been working a lot with MVC sites lately and experimenting with how to make them *usable* on mobile browsers.  This is post is about the single line of mark-up you can add to your sites Master Page, or in this case your _Layout.cshtml.

Before I get to that line I am going to show you a quick screen shot of a vanilla MVC 3 application, that can be downloaded here.

First is a screen shot of the site running in a desktop browser.

Next, is the site rendered on Windows Phone 7, Android, and iPhone.

Windows Phone 7	Opera Mobile (Android)	iPhone

The first thing you notice is that iOS does a fairly good job adaptively rendering the site, damn Apple!  Next you will notice that all WP7 and Android do is zoom out so the site fits on the device.  A site of any significant content or functionality would be almost useless because of the amount of panning and zooming that would be required.  I am sure we have all dealt with sites on our mobile devices like that.  So what can we do to make the site render better in WP7 and Android?

You can actually get a long way towards perfect mobile rendering of your site by adding one simple html tag.

The meta viewport tag can be used to control how HTML content is displayed in mobile browsers.  The meta viewport tag has properties like width, height, minimum-scale, and maximum-scale.  In this example the particular property we are concerned with is the width property.  We want to tell the the browser to render our content width at the width of device.

Let’s see what happens when we add that tag to the head of our _Layout.cshtml file

As you can see above, because the meta viewport tag only effects mobile browsers our desktop version looks exactly the same.  Let’s check on the mobile browsers.

Windows Phone 7	Opera Mobile (Android)	iPhone

The site looks much better on Windows Phone 7 and Android, and still looks the same in Apple.  So by adding that single line of mark-up we where able to give our mobile users a much better user experience.

Stay tuned for a future post on using CSS Media Queries to improve the mobile experience even further.